Elizabeth I by Margaret George Page B

yours.”
    “You ungrateful bastard!”
    “No bastard, unless what the rumors say is true—that Robert Dudley was your lover long before he became your husband, and that I’m his son.”
    “If I told you I did not know, would you believe me?” I could hardly believe I was speaking those words.
    “I’d rather not. I’d rather think that I inherited the earlship of Essex by rightful descent. Mother, let’s forget this. I spoke hastily.”
    Yes, let us forget these rash mutterings. I smiled and patted the place next to me on the cushioned window seat. “I am happy to have you here,” I said. He visited me seldom these days, busy with his London dwelling. It had been Durham House, then it became Leicester House, now it was renamed Essex House. No matter its name, it was one of the grandest on the Strand. He had come by it through my marriage to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, his stepfather. He would not have his blood, then, but was happy enough to inherit his house!
    “You would rather we be at Essex House, I think,” he said.
    “Nonsense! Do you not find Drayton Bassett exhilarating?” I teased him. After my too-quick marriage to Christopher Blount, a man almost my son’s age, following the death of Leicester, discretion had advised me to live far from court in the countryside of Staffordshire. If Her Majesty had never forgiven me for snatching her long-suffering love from under her nose and marrying him, the hint that perhaps I had amused myself with a young lover as well had earned her implacable hatred. To steal one’s man was injurious; to betray or spurn him afterward was a crime. But I do not admit that I betrayed him. What was a lonely widow to do? I had many debts. The vindictive Queen had hounded me for Leicester’s debts, stripping my home of all the movable goods. As if that would bring him back to life and return him to her. No, he sleeps in Warwick Chapel, and his marble monument completed my financial ruin. In his will, he lauded me as his “faithful and very loving and obedient careful wife.” He also called me “my dear and poor disconsolate wife.” Obviously I had to overcome my grief as best I could, with Christopher. So ... as the Queen’s own Knights of the Garter’s motto says, Honi soit qui mal y pense— “Shame upon him who thinks evil of it.” Leicester was pleased with my services as a wife, and there the matter should end. On his monument is engraved, in Latin, that I, his moestissa uxor —tenderest wife—out of my love and conjugal fidelity, caused this to be raised to the best and dearest of husbands. Of course, I wrote it myself.
    To my surprise, my son smiled. “There’s a part of me that would be content here,” he said. “In truth, a part of me that longs for a quiet life in the country.”
    I laughed, but I could see that he was sincere. “My son, you don’t know what you are saying!”
    “I don’t belong at court!” he burst out. “I’m not that sort of creature. To remember what to say to each person, the better to use them, and to hide my true feelings so they can’t use me—Mother, I find it repugnant!”
    “It is, indeed, hard work,” I said cautiously.
    “I am not a courtier! I am not the stuff of which they are made.”
    “Yet you do so well as one,” I reminded him.
    “For a little while. But I cannot keep it up. Every day I fear stumbling, falling from that place I have sweated so in climbing to. There are natural courtiers, like Robert Dudley—some say that was his main or only talent—and Philip Sidney. How easy it was for them!”
    I turned his head so he could look out the window. “Take a long, slow look,” I told him. Drayton Manor lay surrounded by an oak grove and, beyond that, fields. The village of Drayton Bassett nearby had barely an alehouse, a smithy, and a church and vacated convent. It was four days’ ride from London under a sleepy sky. “After walking these grounds four or five times, riding across the meadows,